A new day brought with it a new portion of pain, hardship, and despair.
Sunny and Elyas were dragged into the arena, the same Ascended warmonger guiding them by the chains attached to the collars. Sunny stumbled forward, his gaze locked on the man's broad back.
The jailer was incredibly tall for a human, his height more than even that of the shadow demon Sunny was currently inhabiting. His figure was solemn and powerful, a sense of terrifying strength radiating from it in almost physical waves. The apostle of War wore the same ragged leather armor and a tattered red robe, his features hidden behind a deep hood.
In all these weeks, Sunny had never seen his face, or heard him speak.
The great blade on the Ascended warrior's back looked special, too. It was definitely enchanted with very powerful magic… now that Sunny turned his thoughts to the nature of sorcery, he was silently studying the line of runes inscribed along the edge of the heavy weapon.
'Runic magic again…'
That made sense… how else were these ancient people supposed to enchant their weapons? It was not like they could rely on Memories and spellweave. That said, magical weapons seemed to be much rarer in the Kingdom of Hope than in the waking world. Most of the Awakened Sunny had fought in the arena wielded either mundane ones or those possessing weak, primitive enchantments.
It was the far cry from the powerful Memories he was used to, although Sunny did not know if that was the nature of this era, or just another sign of the ubiquitous regression that seemed to reign in what remained of the Kingdom of Hope. Everything here seemed devolved, worn out, and on the verge of falling apart.
The whole region was obviously in decline, and had been for some time now.
...While studying the runes on the great blade, he also noticed that it had a few new nicks. The leather armor of the silent giant had more scratches than before, as well…
It seemed that the Ascended was participating in the battles in the arena himself.
'I guess I'll have to fight that monster too, eventually...'
Finally, a rusty iron gate appeared in front of them, blinding sunlight streaming through its bars. The rumbling voices of the crowd echoed from the stone walls, washing over him like a cursed tide.
The gate swung open, and the chains came off of their collars. Sunny and Elyas entered the first killing box and watched as their opponents crawled out of a similar tunnel.
The young Awakened brandished his weapon — a short spear fashioned out of a long twisting horn — and forced out a weak smile.
"Luck... luck is on our side today, Demon! These creatures are called Burrowers. On solid stone, their main advantage is gone! Just don't let them swallow you…"
Sunny snarled, then dashed forward with a roar.
…Hard. Today was going to be hard.
He was forced to use Shadow Dance to peer into the souls of the Nightmare Creatures, despite suspecting that doing so too much threatened to destroy his already unsteady mind. He also had to both concentrate on the fight and thoroughly study the ancient theater, in hopes of discovering signs of Hope's sorcery.
It was almost like his first training sessions with Saint, when he had to resist the taciturn monster while simultaneously keeping an eye on his shadow to decipher the secret of its dance. The problem was that, back then, he had ended up beaten black and blue by Saint most of the time.
Now, he couldn't allow himself to lose.
Sunny descended upon the repulsive Burrowers, which looked like sacks of bulbous flesh with giant circular maws gaping in them, and tried to slaughter the abominations without being eaten alive.
…The first fight came and went, and then, it was time for the second one, and then the third one, and then the fourth.
Sunny had slain the vicious Burrowers, and then a creature that resembled a giant walking skeleton, its bones green and as tough as granite, and then a swarm of monstrous ants that covered the floor of the arena like a carpet, and then a being that was like an oozing mountain of mire sludge that had long, razor-sharp steel sickles protruding from it.
His body was torn, and sliced, and crushed, and gnawed on. Elyas had healed the most terrible wounds, but the rest remained, not worthy of having precious soul essence wasted on them, yet.
Sunny was once again overwhelmed by pain, rage, and the desperate need to fight for his survival. Everything else disappeared… the only thing that remained was battle, blood, and murder.
And fear.
...However, today, that wasn't enough.
He fought through the battle fog that encompassed his mind and kept searching, studying every corner of the Red Colosseum — the floor of the arena, the walls surrounding it, the rows of seats rising above — in search of intricately engraved runes.
But all he saw were the statues of War God, the jubilant faces of the spectators, and the weathered surface of ancient stones. There was no hint of any engravings anywhere.
'Where are you… where...'
The fifth battle almost cost him his life. While fighting against a familiar foe — a giant worm-like creature that possessed a seemingly endless reserve of vitality — Suny had tripped on the uneven surface of the floor of the arena, lost his balance, and tumbled down.
If not for Elyas, who fearlessly jumped forward and pulled the attention of the terrible abomination to himself, he would have been viciously mauled, or even lost his life.
Back when Sunny had fought a worm like that the first time, the creature eventually succumbed to the soul damage continuously dealt to it by the Cruel Sight. Today, however, he had no deadly Memory to help him… only his claws, his fangs, and his horns.
In the end, Sunny had to literally rip the giant abomination to shreds. Only when its body was torn apart completely did the worm stop regenerating new flesh and recovering from all the wounds, and finally died.
Exhausted, Sunny fell to his knees and breathed hoarsely, then threw a hateful glance at the crowd chanting his name. Finally, he lowered his head and glared at the wide groove in the red stone of the arena that had almost cost him his life.
There were several grooves like that in some of the killing boxes, cutting through the floor of the colosseum like broad channels meant for the rivers of blood to flow through them. Usually, he took note of their placement in advance to avoid losing his footing at a dire moment, but today, with his attention split between the battles and the need to study the arena, Sunny had failed in that regard.
'Damn thing… why couldn't they just make the arena flat?!'
Well, the answer was obvious. All that blood had to go somewhere, and if not for these grooves, the whole colosseum would have slowly turned into one giant crimson pool.
He frowned.
'Wait… that doesn't make sense, though…'
Sunny lingered, noticing that the gate to the sixth box was already opening.
The grooves were as ancient as the Red Colosseum itself… which meant that they had been here long before the Warmongers started holding their demented Trials here. Long before the name Red Colosseum was even given to it. freēwēbnovel.com
Which meant that these grooves had been cut through the stone back when it had still been pristine white, and had no blood spilled on it.
So… serving as channels that took away blood could not have been their purpose.
Sunny's lightless eyes narrowed. Suddenly, he realized his mistake.
All this time, he had been looking for the sorcerous runes while expecting them to look like they had the previous times he encountered them — intricate, small, and numerous, arranged into shapes and patterns. And yet, he had found nothing.
But, in fact, the runes were right in front of him the whole time… or rather, beneath his feet.
He was just too small and insignificant to notice them, like an ant crawling across a vast painting and failing to see the whole image for what it was.
There were no circles of intricate runes carved anywhere in the colosseum… instead, the whole vastness of the ancient arena was a runic circle, a canvas Hope had used to create her sorcery.
…He was standing on it.
The runes Hope had used were not small, intricate, and elaborate. Instead, they were giant, spanning the whole width of the blood-soaked arena, and guided torrential floods of soul energy instead of thin streams of it to create the unimaginably powerful enchantments.
Once Sunny knew where to look, it didn't take him long to start noticing a pattern and meaning in the placement and direction of the grooves cut in the ancient stone. The problem was, their scope was too great to be perceived from the floor of the arena. He would have been able to see the entirety of the runes, perhaps, from the very top of the amphitheater.
But fighters were never allowed to leave the battlefield, unless it was to return to the dungeon.
…In the absence of an aerial view, all he could do was to try and compile the disjointed pieces of the puzzle in his mind. By now, Sunny had fought in most of the killing boxes in the arena, except for a few.
After defeating another group of Warmongers and being thrown back into the cage, he spent the entire night trying to remember each of the stages he had shed blood on, and the pattern of the grooves on their floor. It was like assembling a complicated puzzle, only instead of the actual pieces, all he had were fragmented memories of them.
Luckily, his memory had always been good. In fact, after becoming an Awakened and having the opportunity to interact with a lot of different people, many of whom were very smart and educated, Sunny realized that his ability to instantly memorize things were somewhat unnatural even among them. Before, he had just assumed that everyone could do the same.
Still, he had to have paid attention to a thing in order to remember it, which was not the case with all of the grooves — only those that had happened to appear in his way. Plus, he was also having trouble determining how the irregularly shaped killing boxes were situated in relation to each other, since that wasn't something he had thought about before.
The task of creating a perfect three-dimensional replica of the entire arena in his mind was not an easy one.
Over the next few days, he was somewhat distracted while fighting the Nightmare Creatures in the Red Colosseum. Confounded by the fact that their enemies were growing stronger and stronger as all the weaker slaves were being slowly slaughtered, his performance suffered.
And that meant more injuries, more pain, and more torment.
Sometimes, he felt utterly beaten, broken, and hopeless. Sunny was familiar with suffering and hardship, and had experienced a fair share of horrific anguish in his life… but the Trial of the Red Colosseum had turned out to be a hell so dire that even he was having difficulty enduring its burden. It was simply too cruel, too odious, too vile…
And that harrowing torture was not going to end until he gave up.
But he didn't. The strange task of peering into the secrets of the Demon of Desire kept him going, no matter how wounded his body and how broken his spirit became. It was almost like an obsession. Sunny continued to fight, and kill, and suffer… and study the ancient stones.
His mental condition deteriorated so much that even Elyas, who was going through his own terrible ordeal, noticed that something was very wrong with his taciturn demonic partner. The young man tried to encourage the shadow creature as well as he could, but what could he say to soothe the soul-crushing despair of their situation?
They were enslaved, locked in cages, and forced to fight for their lives against a swarm of deadly monsters, only to be thrown back behind the iron bars, fed the raw flesh of the abominations they had just killed, and go through the whole nightmare again the next day, with no hope of ever escaping except for through death… through being killed and eaten by the other prisoners of the Red Colosseum.
Even their captors seemed to be trapped by the Colosseum, chained in the same vicious cycle, and doomed to eventually share the same fate as their slaves. Inside this ancient theater, only bloodshed and madness reigned.
…And yet, all of it was not for nothing. Eventually, after Sunny had lost count of the days they had spent in the colosseum, he finally managed to create a complete image of it in his head. With it came the understanding of the shapes of the giant runes that were cut in the bloodsoaked stone.
And with that understanding came the ability to peer into their purpose.
After learning the shape and position of the runes, Sunny found himself able to peer beneath the surface of the stone and see their function. The ability had always been within him, hiding in the depths of his changed eyes… he just had not known where and how to look, like he had not been aware of his ability to see the soul cores of creatures before clashing with Mordret within the Soul Sea.
Armed with the new knowledge, Sunny was able to perceive vast rivers of soul essence flowing beneath the arena and through its walls, following intricate paths carved for it by the immense runes.
In the end, that was what sorcery was — the ability to guide and shape hidden energies, most often that of souls, to express one's will upon the world… the enchantments were simply expressions of the enchanter's will, and the runes were the building blocks with which the enchanter manipulated the movement of energy to achieve their goal. fгeewebnovёl.com
But where was all this soul energy coming from?
At first, Sunny assumed that the Red Colosseum was similar to the Crimson Labyrinth, and fed on the souls of creatures slain within it.
Slaves slaughtering each other in the arena must have been empowering the sorcery enslaving them by the very act of slaughter… but after observing the flow of soul essence through the ancient structure for a while, he realized that his initial theory was wrong.
Instead of the fighters... it was the crowd of spectators that fueled the enchantments. It was their jubilation, their elation, their sincere excitement that were the source of all the power flowing through the ancient theater. Of course… why would the Demon of Desire base her sorcery on death?
Her domain was built upon dreams, emotions, and passion. It was only after the followers of War God had usurped the colosseum that the subject of all this passion became battle, bloodshed, and murder. The current state of the arena was not how it had been supposed to be... it was stolen, perverted, and made into something utterly different.
...Corrupted.
More than a month had already passed after Sunny entered the Second Nightmare. The dungeon was growing less and less crowded, most of the prisoners long killed on the bloody stones of the arena. The end of the hateful Trials — whatever it was supposed to be — was approaching.
Now, he knew the basic principle of how the enchantments keeping him tied to the Red Colosseum functioned…
So, the question was, how was he supposed to use that knowledge to escape?